Category: News Roundup

Big Analytics Roundup (October 26, 2015)

Fourteen stories this week, beginning with an announcement from IBM.  This week, IBM celebrates 14 straight quarters of declining revenue at its IBM Insight conference, appropriately enough at the Mandalay Bay in Vegas, where the restaurants are overhyped and overpriced.

Meanwhile, the first Spark Summit Europe meets in Amsterdam, in the far more interesting setting of the Beurs van Berlage.  There will be a live stream on Wednesday and Thursday — details here.  Sadly, I can’t make this one — the first Spark Summit I’ve missed — but am looking forward to the live stream.

(1) IBM Announces Spark on Bluemix

At its IBM Insight beauty show, IBM announces availability of its Apache Spark cloud service.  Actually, IBM announced it back in July, but that was a public beta.   On ZDNet, Andrew Brust gushes, noting that IBM has DB2, Watson, Netezza, Cognos, TM1, SPSS, Informix and Cloudant in its portfolio.  He fails to note that of those products, exactly one — Cloudant — actually interfaces with Spark.

There were rumors that IBM would have an exciting announcement about Spark at this show, but if this is it — yawn.  Looking at IBM’s “Spark in the cloud” offering, I don’t see anything that sets it apart from other available offerings unless you have a Blue fetish.

Update: Rod Reicks of IBM writes to note that IBM’s new release of SPSS Analytics Server runs processes in Spark.  For the uninitiated, Analytics Server is a product you license from IBM that enables SPSS Modeler user to run selected operations in Hadoop.  Previous versions ran through MapReduce only.  Reicks claims that the latest version runs through Spark when available.

I say “claims” because there is no reference to this feature in IBM’s Release Notes, Installation Guide or User’s Guide.  Spark is mentioned deep in the Administrator Guide, under Troubleshooting.  So the good news is that if the product fails, IBM has some tips — one of which should be “Install Spark.”

You’d think that with IBM’s armies of people they could at least find someone to write documentation.

(2) Mahout Book FAIL

Packt announces a book on Clustering with Mahout with an entire chapter devoted to Canopy Clustering, which the Mahout team just deprecated.

(3) Concurrent Adds Spark Support

Concurrent announces Release 2.0 of Driven, its oddly-named performance management software, which now includes support for Apache Spark.

(4) Flink Founder Touts Streaming Analytics

At Big Data Spain, Data Artisans co-founder Kostas Tzoumas argues that streaming is the basis for all analytics, which is a bit over the top: as they say, if all you have is a hammer, the world looks like a nail.  Still, his deck is a nice intro to Flink, which has made some progress this year.

(5) AtScale Announces Release 3.0

AtScale, one of the more interesting startups in the BI space, delivers Release 3.0 of its OLAP-on Hadoop platform.  Rather than introducing a new user interface into the mix, AtScale makes it possible for BI users to work with Hadoop tables without jumping back and forth to programming tools.  The product currently supports Tableau, Excel, Qlik, Spotfire, MicroStrategy and JasperSoft, and runs on CDH, HDP or MapR with Impala, Spark SQL or Hive on Tez.  The new release includes enhanced role-based security, including Kerberos, Username/Password or LDAP.

(6) Neo: Graphs are Eating the World

Graph database leader Neo announces immediate availability of Neo4j 2.3, which includes what it calls “intelligent applications at scale” and Docker support.  Exactly what Neo means by “intelligence applications at scale” means is unclear, but if Neo is claiming that you no longer have to dump a graph into Spark to run a PageRank, I’ll believe it when I see it.

(7) New Notebook Sharing for Databricks 

Databricks announces new notebook sharing capabilities for its eponymous product.  On the Databricks blog, Denise Li and Dave Wang explain.

(8) Teradata: Blah, Blah, Blah, IoT, Blah, Blah Blah…

At its annual user conference, Teradata announces that it’s heard about IoT.    Teradata also announces that it will make Aster available on Hadoop, which would have been interesting in 2012.  Aster, for the uninitiated, includes a SQL on MapReduce engine, which is rendered obsolete by fast SQL engines like Presto, which Teradata has just embraced.

(9) Flink Forward Redux

As I noted last week, the first Flink Forward conference met in Berlin two weeks ago.  William Benton records his impressions.

Presentations are here.  Some highlights:

  • Dongwon Kim benchmarks Flink against MR, MR on Tez and Spark.  Flink wins.
  • Kostas Tzoumas outlines the Flink development roadmap through Release 1.0.
  • Martin Junghanns explains graph analytics with Flink.
  • Anwar Rizal demonstrates streaming decision trees with Flink.

Henning Kropp offers resources for diving deeply into Flink.

(10) Pyramid Analytics Lands New Funding

Amsterdam-based BI startup Pyramid Analytics announces a $30 million “B” round to help it try to explain why we need more BI software.

(11) Harte Hanks Switches from CDH to MapR

John Leonard explains why Harte Hanks switched from Cloudera to MapR.  Most likely explanation: they were able to cut a cheaper deal with MapR.

(12) Audience Modeling with Spark

Guest posting on the Databricks blog, Eugene Zhulenev explains audience modeling with Spark ML pipelines.

(13) New Functions in Drill

On the MapR blog, Neeraja Rentachintala describes new capabilities in Drill Release 1.2, including SQL window functions.

(14) Integrating Spark and Redshift

“Redshift is where data goes to die.”  — Rob Ferguson, Spark Summit East

On the Databricks blog, Sameer Wadkar of Axiomine explains how to use the spark-redshift package, first introduced in March of this year and now in version 0.5.2.  So you can yank your data out of Redshift and do something with it. (h/t Hadoop Weekly)

Big Analytics Roundup (April 6, 2015)

Late posting today due to holiday travel.

In the week following Spark Summit East, a number of Spark skeptics surfaced, a sign that people take Spark seriously.

The top item of the week, though, is Tiernan Ray’s interview with Michael Stonebraker in Barrons, a must-read.

Analytic Software

Forrester published its latest “wave” for Big Data Predictive Analytics Solutions, an inaptly named report that lumps together solutions that can work with Big Data and those that cannot.  I’ll write a more detailed summary later this week.  Quick takes:  Alteryx, Oracle and RapidMiner did well, but Alpine and Microsoft clearly need to shift some of their analyst relations spending from Gartner to Forrester.

Apache Drill

Apache Drill announces Release 0.8.

Apache Spark

Analysis

In opensource.com, Jen Wike Hugar interviews key Spark contributor Reynold Xin.

Mike Vizard, in the aptly named Talkin’ Cloud, describes the high potential for Spark in the cloud.  (Though he does not mention it, more than half of respondents to a recent Typesafe survey of Spark users said they deploy it in the cloud.)

Matei Zaharia, creator of Spark and CTO of Databricks, held an Ask Me Anything last week on Reddit.  Key takeaways: no, Matei is not a musician, and yes, he likes Nutella. 

Spark has clearly reached a point of inflection when skeptical analysis emerges.  Criticism is healthy, of course, but what the skeptics all seem to share is an ignorance of machine learning and streaming applications, and the challenge of making those applications work well in MapReduce.  In other words, they all seem to misunderstand the purpose of Spark, and would do well to learn more about the platform before quibbling on the margins.

  • Professional cat herder Andrew Oliver compares Spark to Tableau and, shockingly, finds it wanting.  Also, Andrew heard people say unflattering things about Hadoop at Spark Summit East.  Who knew that Hadoop devotees are so sensitive?
  • In DataMill, Nicole Leskowski asks if Apache Spark is the next big thing in Big Data Analytics, a question that would have been timely last year.
  • In TechTarget, Jack Vaughan wonders whether Spark is just a shiny new object, while ruminating about Digital Equipment and the PDP-11.  His point will be lost on most readers.
  • Returning to ZDNet from GigaOm, Andrew Brust asks if Spark is overhyped, citing unnamed second-hand sources that tell him Spark is “not ready for prime time.”   Note to Andrew: you can download the software here.

Spark Core

Matei Zaharia celebrates Spark’s fifth birthday with a brief history.

On the Cloudera blog, Sandy Ryza concludes his series on tuning Spark jobs.

Spark Streaming

On the Databricks blog. Cody Koeninger, Davies Liu and Tathagata Das describe the new direct Kakfa API available in Spark 1.3

Databricks

Databricks announced that Timeful, a startup specializing in intelligent time management, has deployed its recommendation engine in Databricks Cloud.  Case study available here.

Hadoop Ecosystem

In Datanami, Hadoop skeptic Alex Woodie asks if Hadoop needs a reality check, observing that the leading Hadoop distributors do not make money, a trait shared by most industries at comparable points of maturity.  Woodie cites Wikibon’s Big Data revenue summary as evidence that there is little money in Hadoop, without considering the validity of Wikibon’s data (which is self-reported by the vendors and lacks consistent definitions).  Even if we accept the Wikibon data at face value, Woodie also fails to note that startup Palantir (which is totally into Hadoop) now reports more Big Data revenue than industry leader SAS.  Another unanswered question: if Hadoop is so inconsequential, why has Teradata lost half its market value since 2012?

IBM

IBM announces BigInsights 4.0 just nine months after releasing BigInsights 3.0.  BigInsights includes the usual Hadoop bits, plus:

  • BigSQL, a federation engine for SQL across relational databases and Hadoop
  • Big Sheets, a Datameer-like spreadsheet-on-Hadoop tool
  • SystemML, a home-grown machine learning library that runs in MapReduce
  • Text analytics capability
  • Big R, an interface that can push embarrassingly parallel R processing into Hadoop

Streaming and Real-Time Processing

On the O’Reilly Radar blog, Ben Lorica describes platforms and applications for processing data streams.

Big Analytics Roundup (March 30, 2015)

Lots of Spark news this week, following last week’s Sparkalanche, plus some other non-Spark news just to show that Big Analytics isn’t entirely about Spark.

Alteryx

  • In IntelligentHQ, Maria Fonseca interviews Alteryx COO George Mathew, argues that analytics is for people.  Left unanswered: who else it could be for.

Analytic Startups

  • Analytics vendor Ayasdi lands a $55 million “C” round.
  • Localytics, which specializes in analytics for mobile and web apps, secures a $35 million “D” round.

Apache Drill

  • MicroStrategy announces certification of Apache Drill with MicroStrategy Analytics Enterprise Platform.

Apache Spark

Analysis

  • IBM Big Data “evangelist” James Kobelius confirms that IBM has no idea what to do with Spark.
  • In TechRepublic, Matt Asay argues that Hadoop won’t disappear just because it’s slow, knocking over several straw men in the process.   On readwrite, he makes similar points; and on InfoWorld, he goes for the hat trick.
  • In InfoWorld, Platfora’s Peter Schlampp offers five reasons why Spark is the next big thing.

Applications

  • On the Cloudera blog, Sam Shuster of Edmunds.com describes a dashboard built with Spark Streaming, SparkOnHbase and Morphlines.
  • In InfoQ, Srini Penchikala of Pinterest explains why he’s using Spark Streaming, Kafka and MemSQL for a real-time application.

Data Science

  • On the Databricks blog, Joseph Bradley writes an excellent article on Topic Modeling with Spark’s new Latent Dirichlet Allocation capability.

Developer

  • On the Databricks blog, Michael Armbrust describes new Spark SQL features in Spark 1.3
  • On Slideshare, Vida Ha and Holden Karau share tips for writing better Spark programs; video here.

Deep Learning

  • Tomasz Malisiewicz of Vision.ai blogs on Deep Learning versus Machine Learning versus Pattern Recognition.

RapidMiner

  • RapidMiner publishes a white paper on code-free analytics in Hadoop, and another on Hadoop security.

Big Analytics Roundup (March 23, 2015)

This week, Spark Summit East produced a deluge of news and analysis on Apache Spark and Databricks.  Also in the news: a couple of ventures landed funding, SAP released software and SAS soft-launched something new for SAS Visual Analytics.

Analytic Startups

Venture Capital Dispatch on WSJ.D reports that Andreeson Horowitz has invested $7.5 million in AMPLab spinout Tachyon Nexus.  Tachyon Nexus supports the eponymous Tachyon project, a memory-centric storage layer that runs underneath Apache Spark or independently.

Social media mining venture Dataminr pulls $130 million in “D” round financing, demonstrating that the real money in analytics is in applications, not algorithms.

Apache Flink

On the Flink project blog, Fabian Hueske posts an excellent article that describes how joins work in Flink.

Apache Spark

ADTMag rehashes the tired debate about whether Spark and Hadoop are “friends” or “foes”.  Sounds like teens whispering in the hallways of Silicon Valley High.  Spark works with HDFS, and it works with other datastores; it all depends on your use case.  If that means a little less buzz for Hadoop purists, get over it.

To that point, Matt Kalan explains how to use Spark with MongoDB on the Databricks blog.

A paper published by a team at Berkeley summarizes results from Spark benchmark testing, draws surprising conclusions.

In other commentary about Spark:

  • TechCrunch reports on the growth of Spark.
  • TechRepublic wonders if anything can dim Spark.
  • InfoWorld lists five reasons to use Spark for Big Data.

In VentureBeat, Sharmila Mulligan relates how ClearStory Data’s big bet on Spark paid off without explaining the nature of the payoff.  ClearStory has a nice product, but it seems a bit too early for a victory lap.

On the Spark blog, Justin Kestelyn describes exactly-once Spark Streaming with Apache Kafka, a new feature in Spark 1.3.

Databricks

Doug Henschen chides Ion Stoica for plugging Databricks Cloud at Spark Summit East, hinting darkly that some Big Data vendors are threatened by Spark and trying to plant FUD about it.  Vendors planting FUD about competitors that threaten them: who knew that people did such things?  It’s not clear what revenue model Henschen thinks Databricks should pursue; as Hortonworks’ numbers show, “contributing to open source” alone is not a viable business model.  If those Big Data vendors are unhappy that Databricks Cloud competes with what they offer, there is nothing to stop them from embracing Spark and standing up their own cloud service.

In other news:

  • On the Databricks blog, the folks from Uncharted Software describe PanTera, cool visualization software that runs in Databricks Cloud.
  • Rob Marvin of SD Times rounds up new product announcements from Spark Summit East.
  • In PCWorld, Joab Jackson touts the benefits of Databricks Cloud.
  • ConsumerElectronicsNet recaps Databricks’ announcement of the Jobs feature for Databricks Cloud, plus other news from Spark Summit East.
  • On ZDNet, Toby Wolpe reviews the new Jobs feature for production workloads in Databricks Cloud.
  • On the Databricks blog, Abi Mehta announces that Tresata’s TEAK application for AML will be implemented on Databricks Cloud.  Media coverage here, here and here.

Geospatial

MemSQL announced geospatial capabilities for its distributed in-memory NewSQL database.

J. Andrew Rogers asks why geospatial databases are hard to build, then answers his own question.

RapidMiner

Butler Analytics publishes a favorable review of RapidMiner.

SAP

SAP released a new on-premises version of Lumira Edge for visualization, adding to the list of software that is not as good as Tableau.  SAP also released Predictive Analytics 2.0, a product that marries the toylike SAP Predictive Analytics with KXEN InfiniteInsight, a product acquired in 2013.  According to SAP, Predictive Analytics 2.0 is a “single, unified analytics product” with two work environments, which sounds like SAP has bundled two different code bases into a marketing bundle with a common datastore.  Going for a “three-fer”, SAP also adds Lumira Edge to the bundle.

SAS

American Banker reports that SAS has “launched” SAS Transaction Monitoring Optimization for AML scenario testing; in this case, “launch”, means marketing collateral is available.  The product is said to run on top of SAS Visual Analytics, which itself runs on top of SAS LASR Server, SAS’ “other” distributed in-memory platform.

Big Analytics Roundup (March 16, 2015)

Big Analytics news and analysis from around the web.  Featured this week: a new Spark release, Spark Summit East, H2O, FPGA chips, Machine Learning, RapidMiner, SQL on Hadoop and Chemistry Cat.

A reminder to readers that Spark Summit East is coming up March 18-19.

Alteryx

  • On the Alteryx Blog, Michael Snow plugs Alteryx and Qlik for predictive analytics.
  • And again, the same combo for spatial analytics.
  • Adam Riley blogs on testing Alteryx macros.

Apache Spark

For an overview, see the Apache Spark Page.

  • The Spark team announces availability of Spark 1.3.0.  Release notes here.  Highlights of the new release include the DataFrames API, Spark SQL graduates from Alpha, new algorithms in MLLib and Spark Streaming, a direct Kafka API for Spark Streaming, plus additional enhancements and bug fixes.  More on this release separately.
  • On Slideshare, Matei Zaharia outlines the 2015 roadmap for Apache Spark.
  • Also on Slideshare, Reynold Xin and Matei review lessons learned from running large Spark clusters.
  • In advance of Spark Summit, O’Reilly offers discounts on Spark video training and books.
  • Sandy Ryza, co-author of Advanced Analytics With Spark, writes on tuning Spark jobs, on the Cloudera Engineering blog
  • Databricks announces that advertising automation vendor Sharethrough has selected Spark and Databricks Cloud to process Terabyte scale clickstream data.  Case study published here.
  • Holden Karau publishes a Spark testing procedure on Git.
  • On RedMonk, Donnie Berkholz summarizes growing awareness and interest in Spark.

Buzzwords

  • In Wired, Patrick McFadin hits the trifecta with Apache Spark, NoSQL databases and IoT.

H2O

High Performance Computing

  • Datanami reports that a Ryft One FPGA chip (with limited functionality) offers throughput equivalent to 100-200 Spark nodes.  More coverage here.   Ryft’s Christian Shrauder blogs about FGPA.

Machine Learning

  • Ching and Daniel propose using Random Matrix Theory to analyze highly dimensional social media data.
  • Cheng-Tao Chu offers seven ways to mess up your next machine learning project.
  • AMPLab‘s Jiannen Wang blogs on human-in-the-loop machine learning.  Someone should write a book about that.

RapidMiner

SQL on Hadoop

  • On the Pivotal blog, a podcast about Hawq.
  • The Apache Software Foundation announces release 0.10 of Apache Tajo; Silicon Angle reports with a backgrounder.
  • TechWorld reports that AirBNB has open-sourced Airpal, an application that runs on Facebook’s PrestoDB.  According to the story, Airpal is an application that “allows…non-technical employees to work like data scientists”, which suggests that TechWorld thinks data scientists do nothing but SQL.
  • Splice Machine has updated FAQs for its RDBMS-on-Hadoop.

Zementis

Big Analytics Roundup (March 9, 2015)

Here’s a roundup of interesting Big Analytics news and analysis from the past week.  Featured this week: Hortonworks, Alpine, Spark and H2O.

Hortonworks

  • Matt Asay, writing in InfoWorld, deconstructs Hortonworks’ earnings fiasco, and with it the “100% open source” business model.

Alpine Data Labs

  • VentureBeat reports a story that Alpine Data Labs claims 10X growth in user count and billings year over year.
  • MarketWired reports the same story.
  • ITBusinessNet too.

There is no supporting press release from Alpine Data Labs.   The VentureBeat story includes the nugget that Alpine currently has “more than 60” customers; an insider tells me that the number is closer to 75, roughly twice as many as last year.  Alpine has changed its selling model, hiring its own sales force instead of selling through EMC and Pivotal.  This also means that Alpine has changed its messaging from “we run on Greenplum and PostgresSQL, but mostly on Greenplum” to “we run on anything.”  This is an aspiration, to be sure, but a good one.

Alpine has also changed its pricing model from a perpetual server-based model to a user-based subscription model.

Separately, Ventana Research publishes a positive review of Alpine Chorus 5.0.

Apache Spark

  • Jonathan Buckley of Qubole argues that the three open source projects that transformed Hadoop are Hive, Spark and Presto.  It’s an odd choice.  Hive is certainly a key project and Spark is red hot; Presto, not so much.
  • Data prep engine vendor Paxata announces a new release that runs on Spark, releases benchmark report showing significant performance improvements.
  • Databricks announces selection of Databricks Cloud as preferred platform for B2B vendor Radius Intelligence, publishes case study.
  • Forbes profiles Databricks CEO Ion Stoica.
  • Ian Lumb offers eight reasons why Spark is hot.
  • Databricks published a slideshare about Spark DataFrames, which will be available in Spark 1.3 later this month.
  • From the Cloudera blog, an excellent post showing how to build an application for financial markets risk calculations in Spark.

H2O

  • In an interview with KDNuggets, Ted Dunning touts Mahout and H2O over Spark.
  • H2O.ai announces Cloudera certification for its Sparking Water interface to Spark.

General

CMSWire rehashes the Gartner Magic Quadrant without adding value.   The author notes breathlessly that “many KNIME enthusiasts are data miners”, and “on the downside, (RapidMiner’s) user base is mostly data scientists”; as if these points are news, and as if there is something extraordinary about data miners and data scientists using data mining and data science tools.

Big Analytics Roundup (March 2, 2015)

Here is a roundup of some recent Big Analytics news and analysis.

General

  • SiliconAngle covers the Big Data money trail.

Apache Spark

  • Curt Monash writes about Databricks and Spark on his DBMS2 blog.
  • On the Databricks blog, Dave Wang summarizes Spark highlights from Strata + Hadoop World.
  • In this post, Hammer Lab describes how to monitor Spark with Graphite and Grafana.
  • Cloudera announces Hive on Spark beta.
  • InfoWorld covers Spark’s planned support for R in Release 1.3.
  • Qubole announces Spark as a Service.

 Dato/GraphLab

  • Dato announces new version of GraphLab Create.

 H2O

  • From Strata + Hadoop World, Prithvi Pravu talks about using H2O.
  • Also from Strata, here is Cliff Click’s presentation on H2O, Spark and Python.
  • On the H2O blog, Arno Candel publishes a performance tuning guide for H2O Deep Learning.

 

 

Spark Updates

Here is a quick roundup of some recent Apache Spark news.

(1) Databricks and Typesafe released results from a survey of 2,136 individuals (mostly developers).  Some key findings:

  • 13% of respondents run Spark in production, 20% plan to use Spark in 2015
  • Most say they expect to use the 82% Spark core to replace MapReduce
  • 88% say they use the Scala API
  • Respondents split on deployment: 54% deploy Spark standalone, 42% co-located with Hadoop under YARN
  • 62% load data from HDFS, 46% from unspecified databases, 41% from Apache Kafka, 29% from Amazon S3

Analysis from GigaOm here.  Copy of the report available here (registration required).

(2) On the Databricks blog, Jeremy Freeman introduces streaming k-means, a capability included in Spark 1.2.   Excellent article outlining some of the practical differences between streaming and static analytics.

(3) NewSQL vendor MemSQL announced availability of its Spark Connector, which it claims offers seamless connectivity with Spark.   More coverage here, here and here; analysis here.

(4) Learning Spark, by Holden Karau, Andy Konwinski, Patrick Wendell, and Matei Zaharia is now available from O’Reilly Media.

(5) InfoWorld selected Apache Spark (along with 31 other products and open source projects) for its 2015 Technology of the Year Award.